Transcript: MLS Cup Don Garber halftime Max Bretos And it is our honor to be joined by the Commissioner of Major League Soccer... Don Garber Gentlemen. Alexi Lalas Looking good! MB ...Don Garber! Kasey Keller (lol @ AL) DG And I use that loosely! AL (smh @ DG) KK (lol kmn) MB (lol don't interrupt me assholes) MB Of course Don, has to be asked a big question heading into this MLS Cup, final game for David Beckham, how do you look back at his time here? DG You know as a great success for him and for us Max, you know he came in said, he wanted to help build the league and the sport, that has happened, he wanted to win championships, he's been in 3 championship games, won one, so overall it was a great success. KK So Commissioner there's been a little bit of a trend of a little bit more... maybe Latin influence and the idea of this kind of super fun that we'll go out and buy all the young players out of Central America, is there a trend of maybe going away from the American player a little bit more? DG No not, not in any way Kasey, I mean at the end of the day this league has always been a mix of International players called from Europe, a bunch of players from this region, Central America and the Caribbean, and then the core of our rosters are American players, we're going to invest deeply in those American players, particularly in our Academy programs, allow our clubs more flexibility in retaining some of those American players but we've got to find ways to get that mix to continue, and that mix has really been working, look at where the league is today AL Commissioner speaking of American players or Canadian players, I got a lot of questions on Twitter about the influence of you, the league, on the individual clubs, and when you talk about DPs, guys like Tim Cahill making 3.5, Kenny Miller making 1.2, Kris Boyd making 1.5, and then you look at a guy like Graham Zusi or Chris Wondolowski who may not have the international cache, would you support the individual teams making those types of players designated players and paying them millions of dollars, if so why or why not? DG Well Again Landon's a designated player, well Landon's an American player, I think when Graham gets renewed, I hope, we'll be able to do whatever we can to try to retain him, and that includes paying him lots of money above our maximum, we'll have to do that, we tried to do that with Stuart Holden and we weren't able to achieve that, so I think it's less about passports, it's more about what's the market, what do we need to do to ensure that we're going to get the right players on the field, and try to find a way to have a product that people care about Alexi, and I think it actually is working pretty well. AL Is the international market you're talking about, or domestically how they're doing in MLS, that's more important? DG Well you know any market is about what people's opportunities are, whether it's you guys whether you're going to work here or someplace else, or a soccer player or a Commissioner, so we tend to be in a position where we're going to pay what we need to pay in order to retain the services of a player or find a player to have him come play here, and there's a US based market for most of the American players if they're going to go overseas we've got to pay them what they're going to get overseas or they're not going to resign with us MB Commissioner we opened up the questions to the fans we have the boot room on a hash tag (#FCBootRoom) I have a double barrel question here from jschar87 one question how many teams are too many in MLS and will we see relegation promotion in the foreseeable future? AL Oh there it is! DG I don't know that how many are too many, we're trying to get our 20th team in NY, you guys are familiar with that, this is a big country, there's 350 million people, 3 times zones, at some point there will be a lot more teams than there are today, by the way more jobs for everybody, and I think more popularity for our league, promotion relegation at some point Max, how great would it be, separate us from all the other leagues (American?), but we need to have vibrant second divisions, we need to have a more mature market, until that happens I don't see it happening. MB Great developments though certainly in 2012 another banner year for MLS and we look forward to 2013 and we thank you for your time Commissioner. DG Thank you guys, it's great, appreciate it. KK (nods a couple times to DG) AL (head nods to DG once so vigorously it's practically a bow)